Facebook Memories timeline gets accidental preview

Facebook has prematurely previewed an upcoming feature, with the social networking site forced to go offline as engineers scrabbled to put the “internal prototype” back in its box. Facebook Memories introduces a timeline to users’ profiles, showing how many statuses were written each year and how many friends were added, along with a sprinkling of photos to illustrate those changes.

Facebook Places also moved around in the accidental Memories preview, with a new timeline of its own accessed from the left-hand toolbar. This shows a list of all your own Places check-ins, along with the popular locations that your friends have checked into.

According to a message posted to the Facebook profile, “for a brief period of time, some internal prototypes were accidentally exposed to people externally. As a result, we disabled the site for a few minutes. It’s back up, and we apologize for the inconvenience.” It’s unclear when Facebook Memories will make its official debut.